Troll heroics: first impressions

(Lacking screenshots of the actual boss fights – since I was too busy tanking to take any – the above will have to do. If you’ve done the lashtail hatchling quest chain in Northern Stranglethorn Vale, once you kill Mandokir you get your hatchling back. And she’s “Lashtail Hatchling <playername’aka>” rather than “<playername’s companion>”. Awwwww.)

I’ve spent the better part of an afternoon and evening tanking Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman. My first run was alone; all the rest were done with Alieth, my trusty pocket healer. Some of the difficulty of the instances was doubtlessly removed by the fact of having a healer with an average ilvl of 370 (some kills would’ve been wipes with a lesser-geared healer), but considering that a healer wearing full PVP gear could keep me up just fine on my lone run through ZA without Alieth, I don’t think the instances are that hard. We got all the new achievements without much trouble (with the exception of Spirit Twister – we gave it a couple of tries, but it was a late-night group, everybody was tired, so we eventually decided the hell with it and just killed the boss).

And, at least for now, I think they’re fun. I like Zul’Gurub better than Zul’Aman: without going too in-depth about it (I’ll probably be making a post detailing boss strategies at some point), Zul’Gurub got brand new mechanics for every fight, whereas Zul’Aman is exactly identical to how the raid used to be, with minor adjustments made to allow for the smaller group size and composition. It makes me think that ZA was just an afterthought – that they worked on ZG, with all the shiny new fights, and then when they got closer to releasing it they thought “hm, wait a second, we can’t just release one heroic, especially since Firelands is nowhere near ready yet, let’s rehash ZA for a 5man so we have a second heroic to release”. Ah well.